EVENTS

The madeleine

It has been well established in humans that sensory cues like songs and smells can help transport our minds back to the past.

The team, led by Gema Martin-Ordas of Aarhus University, Denmark, used the same principle. They found that cues – keeping the experimental set up the same – triggered the apes’ memories.

They observed that 90% of the apes who experienced the event three years earlier found the tool in the correct location almost instantly.

“Our data, and other emerging evidence, keep challenging the idea of non-human animals being stuck in time,” said Dr Martin-Ordas.

“We show not only that chimpanzees and orangutans remember events that happened two weeks or three years ago, but also that they can remember them even when they are not expecting to have to recall those events at a later time.

In 2009, the team ushered 12 of the apes into the middle of several connected cages. In full view, they hid two tools in different boxes within the adjacent rooms. Their job was to remember where these tools were—they would need them to reach an inaccessible piece of food in a later test. They had four shots at doing this.

Over the next three years, the apes went about their lives. They ate, slept, socialised, and took part in many more studies. Then, in 2012, eleven of them were led into the same set of rooms with tool-containing boxes in the same locations. And all of them, except for one, went straight to boxes and retrieved the tools. They remembered.

Call was surprised at “how quickly they retrieved the tools as soon as we opened the doors”. They all did this on their first attempt, without prompts or trial-and-error. They didn’t know this test was coming—in 2009, even the researchers hadn’t planned to repeat their experiment three years later. And by contrast, seven individuals that weren’t part of the original experiment didn’t head for the boxes; they just explored the rooms randomly.

Guy gets bored of playing fetch with stupid dog, puts toy out of reach on top of a tall drawer. Later, gets toy down and uses it again.

For the rest of the dog’s life, despite seeing the same toy that went up there come back to him the same day, keeps going back to the drawers and looking at the top – expecting something he wants is still up there, waiting.

I heard squirrels increase brain mass to remember where they planted nuts, then shed the extra mass when they don’t need it. I don’t know if that’s true or anything about the mechanisms involved (does the mass mean nerve branches, extra nutrients of some kind, or what?), but I saw it on that there television.

Crows have been known to change their entire migration pattern to avoid farms where even a single crow has been killed in the past. Generations upon generations later, they still remember specific houses where one measly bird has died.

An oversized genitally intact jerkweed of a miniature dachsund. He had longevity and health like Jack LaLanne, but broke down hard in his last years because his owner was too much of a wiener to take him to the vet. Sad stuff.